Once upon a time in a dreary computer closet, a seasoned admin was preparing to migrate his exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013. Like a good tech, he did his homework and when it came time to begin he felt confident, having done so may other exchange migrations in the past. The day arrived! Oh the smell of new hardware when it first powers on... almost like a new car, but better! Anticipation was building as he scaled the environment just as he had planned. vmware 5.5, and enough storage to house the national archive, and licensing to only be rivaled by Microsoft themselves. Now the environment is built, storage allocated, and server images abound. The Exchange 2013 install went just as planned. All prerequisites were accounted for and everything was right with the world. The first official 2013 mailbox was created and assigned all the necessary admin roles. Then came the part to test a "mailbox move"! This of course went flawlessly. The test account he created earlier was now part of the shiny new Exchange 2013 environment. Outlook Web worked great, and again all was right with the world until... DUN DUN DUN! WAIT, whats this? Outlook 2010 wont connect to 2013? After a few days of pounding away, a new certificate was created, & what seemed like a thousand powershell commands were run, DNS records created/changed... this resolved the Outlook connectivity. WHEW! That was close, he thought as he sent a test email from the newly connected Outlook 2010. hmmmmmm? this is strange?!? Where is that email? STUCK IN THE QUEUE?? WHAT??? That's right, mail was being held up! SMTP Relay to Mailbox Delivery Group was not performing as designed or planned... or whatever!?! It just wasn't working. Now he's upset... telnet from Exch2007 > Exch2013--- PERFECT! telnet from Exch2013 > Exch2007--- not so perfect... xWall on 2007 was stopping mail from passing from 13 to 07. But I checked... it's disabled! Heck, it aint even licensed anymore; at least since 2012! To make a long story short(er)... UNINSTALL xWALL! If there are still rules in place, it will continue to do it's job. Don't wast time!

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Kforward88, what happens when you telnet to the Exchange 2007 server? It is very common for some organization admins to restrict inbound mail flow to only their mail gateway and such. They do this by restricting the receive connector. Can you please check your receive connector(s) on all your Exchange 2007 servers and confirm that it is not being restricted by source IP addresses? If so, add the exchange 2013 server to the connector.

That was close, he thought as he sent a test email from the newly connected Outlook 2010. hmmmmmm? this is strange?!? Where is that email? STUCK IN THE QUEUE?? WHAT??? That's right, mail was being held up! SMTP Relay to Mailbox Delivery Group was not performing as designed or planned... or whatever!?! It just wasn't working. Now he's upset... telnet from Exch2007 > Exch2013--- PERFECT! telnet from Exch2013 > Exch2007--- not so perfect... xWall on 2007 was stopping mail from passing from 13 to 07. But I checked... it's disabled! Heck, it aint even licensed anymore; at least since 2012!